American Holocaust Survivor Intends to Make Germany Pay : World War II: His family died at Nazis’ hands, and he narrowly survived. But because of his nationality, he was denied reparations.

Recurring headaches, insomnia, stomach disorders and occasionally acute depression have only strengthened Hugo Princz’s resolve to make Germany atone 50 years later for the Nazi atrocities inflicted upon him and his family.

One of only two Holocaust survivors who were American civilians at the time of their capture, Princz still has nightmares about how the SS forced him to watch as his younger brothers, Arthur, 19, and Alex, 15, were starved to death at Auschwitz.

His father, mother and sister, he believes, all were murdered in the fall of 1942 at Maidanek, a concentration camp in Poland.

Germany has paid out billions of dollars in war crime pensions to other Holocaust survivors. But for 38 years, rejecting repeated U.S. diplomatic appeals, it has refused to provide a dime to Princz. Why? Because from the very beginning Princz was an American citizen.

The Bonn government is trying to block a trial in what Princz, a retired grocery store clerk, calls his “forum of last resort” for seeking the $500-a-month pension.

Claiming sovereign immunity, Germany has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington to dismiss the suit before a trial set for May.

“The German government very much regrets what happened to Mr. Princz . . . and after the war passed various laws compensating individuals like Mr. Princz for the wrongs they suffered,” said Peter Heidenberger, the German Embassy’s lawyer in the case.

But the original law compensating Holocaust victims covered only refugees and not U.S. citizens, Heidenberger said. And Princz missed a 1969 deadline for filing a claim under a 1965 law that did hold the possibility of some relief, Heidenberger said.

Princz, 71, and his wife live in Highland Park, N.J., where he works part-time at a local Jewish community center. He refused to be interviewed before the trial.

Princz is alive today only because an American armored corps advancing across southern Germany intercepted a train carrying slave laborers from the Messerschmitt airplane factory to the Alps a week before the Third Reich’s surrender.

Evidence in the Nuremberg trials showed that the SS planned to exterminate tens of thousands like Princz in the Alps to preclude their testifying about the Holocaust.

Princz differed in one respect from the hundreds of other half-dead people GIs pulled from the cattle cars that April 29, 1945. To identify his nationality, the Germans had stenciled “USA” on the jersey of his prisoner’s garb.

While most of the concentration camp victims freed that day were sent to one of many crude refugee centers, the soldiers reckoned that Princz, as an American, deserved better. They took him to a U.S. military hospital.

U.S. District Court Judge Stanley Sporkin believes Princz deserves better too.

“We’re going to try the Holocaust here,” Sporkin, who also is Jewish, said in setting a trial to begin May 26. The judge called Germany’s claim to immunity “outrageous” and said that “American citizenship isn’t worth the paper it’s written on” if this case is dismissed.

“Where did you ever think of taking an American citizen and throwing him in a concentration camp?” Sporkin bristled at Heidenberger at a hearing in December. “This man was going to be killed. He was going to be butchered. He was going to be made into lampshades.

“And where they go do that to an American citizen . . . simply because he is Jewish . . . that American citizen has every right to seek vindication in the courts of his own land,” the judge said.

Princz’s attorney, Steven Perles, said he is prepared to put Germany through a new Holocaust trial if that’s what the judge wants. The Anti-Defamation League is seeking to intervene in the case on Princz’s behalf.

Perles says he plans on seeking photos from archivists at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opening April 26 just a dozen blocks from the federal courthouse for use as trial exhibits.

“You can’t describe what this man went through, staring at death day to day without showing how prisoners were housed at Auschwitz, the extermination facilities at Maidanek, where his family was killed,” Perles said.

According to court documents undisputed by the German government, Princz, his parents, two brothers and a sister all became trapped in German-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. His father, an American, made a living leasing combines to small Czech farmers at harvest time.

Ninety days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they were arrested by the Slovak Fascist police as enemy aliens and turned over to the German SS. Papers identifying everyone in the family as U.S. citizens were confiscated.

Instead of being swapped in a Red Cross-sponsored exchange of prisoners, as most other American civilians were, the family was taken to Maidanek.

“Presumably, he was put in because he was Jewish-American,” Perles said. His client was 19 then and it was a “confused time,” the lawyer said. “He may never know why he was not swapped.”

In Poland, the family was separated. Based on historical accounts of the Holocaust, Perles believes the SS concluded that Herman Princz, his wife and daughter would be of no use as slave laborers and executed them. Hugo and his brothers, however, were healthy, strong teen-agers.

A month after their arrest, Hugo, Arthur and Alex were taken to Auschwitz. There, Hugo was tattooed on his chest and left forearm--Prisoner No. 36 707--and leased by the SS to one of Germany’s largest industrial cartels, I.G. Farben, as a bricklayer.

I.G. Farben paid the German government 4 marks a day for Princz’s services as a skilled laborer in the construction of a $250-million chemical plant at nearby Birkenau.

Arthur and Alex Princz also were leased to I.G. Farben. But they were injured on the job and taken to a hospital, where they were denied adequate food and water to bring about their deaths quicker, Princz contends in his suit.

Housed and assigned to work near the hospital, Princz says he had to watch his brothers starve to death. Two years later, Princz was forced on the death march from Warsaw to Dachau to become a slave laborer at the Messerschmitt factory.

At Dachau, Princz was one of thousands of concrete workers assigned to repair the underground aircraft factory after what became almost daily Allied bombing raids in the final days of the war.

Princz declines to speak directly with reporters while his case is pending. But responding to questions relayed by his attorney, he said it was at Dachau that he realized for the first time in more than three years of captivity that Germany was going to lose the war.

“We were getting very little news about the war, but the Allies were bombing in broad daylight,” he said. “It was the biggest thrill. We weren’t afraid. We knew Germany was defeated because there was no antiaircraft fire.”

Upon his release from the American military hospital, Princz went back to Czechoslovakia seeking evidence that someone in his family might have survived. There was none. The small farm his father had bought was still there, but it had been confiscated by the newly installed Communist government.

To get around Germany’s claim of sovereign immunity, Princz alleges that his enslavement on behalf of I.G. Farben and Messerschmitt was a commercial enterprise exempt under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act.

His suit notes that civilian directors of I.G. Farben and Messerschmitt were later tried and convicted at Nuremberg for slavery and mass murder after the court rejected claims that their acts were compelled by the government.

After the Nuremberg trials, Allied Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the breakup of I.G. Farben into what became three companies--BASF, Hoechst and Bayer. Eisenhower forbade them from doing business in the United States without first paying reparations to those enslaved during the war.

The three companies, now with extensive U.S. holdings, set up a compensation fund to augment another fund established by West Germany’s government. A restitution office was established in New York to handle disbursements from the commingled funds.

It was there that Hugo Princz first applied in 1955 for his pension. That November, he got his first rejection.

“Because you were an American citizen at the time of your persecution and the further reason that on Jan. 1, 1947, you were not a resident within the territory of the German Reich, you are not entitled to a claim for compensation,” the restitution office wrote him.

The other American survivor of the Holocaust had been arrested in German-occupied Holland. Living in California now, he is getting a pension because the Dutch, in their treaty with Germany over war crimes reparations, retained the right to determine eligibility. Under their criteria, anyone captured in Holland, regardless of nationality, qualified.

In 1984, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) took up Princz’s cause, appealing to the State Department to press his claim. It did. So did officials at the German Embassy in Washington. The answer in 1987 from the West German Foreign Ministry in Bonn was still no.

When the two Germanies merged in October, 1990, another senator, Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), urged U.S. diplomats to try again. A treaty between the United States and the newly reunited Germany took effect five months later. It provided for another round of diplomatic negotiations to settle matters arising out of World War II, and the State Department asked Princz to delay going to court.

Hearing of no progress and fearing he might be precluded from legal action by what could be interpreted as statute of limitations in the accord, Princz filed his suit three days before the first anniversary of the new treaty.

“To them, this has become a matter of national honor,” Princz’s lawyer, Perles, says of the German government. “When I first took the case in 1986, I expected to be done with it in 90 days. They admit this happened, they say they’re sorry for it, but they’re not going to pay.”